WordPress Newsletter

Few weeks ago, I had to a weekly newsletter to a mailing list which had over 30.000 subscribers. At first it looks like an easy job. All I had to do was to find out a WordPress newsletter plugin which will allow me to create a subscription form for new users and also will allow me to send the newsletter to all of my subscribers.

As a side note, the client, had a website powered by Open Cart platform. It was an old website, so we decided to move to WordPress using WooCommerce Plugin. The main problem was that on the old website there were 30.000 customers which bought their products in the past 9 years.

After setting every thing up, installing WordPress, installing and configure WooCommerce, and importing all 30.000 customers into WordPress data base, it was time to send the weekly newsletter. Beside the newsletter we need it to have the ability to send emails which will inform the customers of their new accounts. We kept the username for each customer but the old password was changed with a new one, created for each user. So in total I will have to send over 60.000 emails.

First thing was to move to a better hosting, and I choose Media Temple, were I bought a Grid Web Hosting (GS). As for my WordPress newsletter plugin, I did choose K-News Pro. I bought a licence to use all their feature. The problem was the hosting account on Media Temple could only sustain 500 emails / hour. After some research, I decided to use a 3rd-party SMTP service so I choose SMTP2GO – which turned out to be a great choice – not to mention their 5 start tech support.

Since I need it to send in the first place 60.000 emails plus 30.000 every week, I bought Diamond Elite plan which allows me to send 200.000 emails / month. The K-News Pro plugin allows me to send 500 email / 10 minutes. The problem was the GS (Grid Web Hosting) hosting has a limit of 40 seconds in which the plugin script must run, after those 40 seconds, the script was cut off by my hosting server, and we end up sending all the emails in 4 days.

To wrap things up, if you ever faced a similar situation the following links may have your answer: